Blog to talk about books, reading quotes and much more :)
I like meditation and the Zen way of thinking and I had read a lot of books on this subject, so this will be an important topic for this blog.

01/01/2013

What we seek is not the pure truth

“We are all convinced that we desire the truth above
all. Nothing strange about this. It is natural to man, an intelligent
being, to desire the truth. (I still dare to speak of man as ‘an
intelligent being’!) But actually, what we desire is not ‘the truth’ so
much as it is to be in ‘the right.’ To seek the pure truth for its own
sake may be natural to us, but we are not able to act always in this
respect according to our nature. What we seek is not the pure truth, but
the partial truth that justifies our prejudices, our limitations, our
selfishness. This is not ‘the truth.’ It is only an argument strong
enough to prove our ‘right.’ And usually our desire to be right is
correlative to our conviction that somebody else (and perhaps everyone
else) is wrong.
Why do we want to prove them wrong? Because we need them to be wrong.
For if they are wrong, and we are right, then our untruth becomes truth:
our selfishness becomes justice and virtue: our cruelty and lust cannot
be fairly condemned. We can rest secure in the fiction we determined to
embrace as ‘truth.’ What we desire is not the truth, but rather that
our lie should be proved ‘right’ and our iniquity be vindicated as
‘just.’ This is what we have done to pervert our natural, instinctive
appetite for truth.
No wonder we hate. No wonder we are violent. No wonder we exhaust
ourselves in preparing for war! And in doing so, of course, we offer the
enemy another reason to believe that he is right, that he must arm,
that he must get ready to destroy us. Our own lie provides the
foundation of truth on which he erects his own lie, and the two lies
together react to produce hatred, murder, disaster.”